Curator's Introduction | The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Dürer's Journeys | National Gallery

well good afternoon everyone my name is susan feuster i'm the curator of our credit suisse exhibition jura's journey and i'm going to be introducing you to it this afternoon i must say that it's wonderful to see so many of you here again in our lecture theatre on site i hope that a number of you may already have had the chance to visit the exhibition and if you haven't done so up to this point i hope perhaps that what you see will inspire you to visit so i want to start with jura himself his images of himself and his own words these are two of the most famous self-portraits that jura made on the left this very beautiful delicate silver point drawing that he made using a mirror when he was only 13 years old and you'll see later on how through his life he wielded that silver point um so deftly and then the famous 1500 self-portrait in munich i'm showing you these because they can't travel anywhere um they're not in our exhibition but i think they do serve to start us off by considering the exceptional nature of jura himself as an artist and the way in which he is so self-conscious and presents himself to us in this very modern way and in his words he talks about human curiosity the sole exception of knowing a great deal we're not wearied by that no one tires of human curiosity and knowing everything there is to know and i think travel constantly inspired jura's curiosity and we'll see how he came back with so many images that exemplify that curiosity and we'll see the way in which they fed into his work jura was born in nuremberg in 1471 and he died there in in 1528 and we'll see during the course of this hour the many journeys that he undertook and in the map that you i'm showing you here here is nuremberg which occupied a very central place in europe it was a place to which it was very easy to travel from north south east and west and a place from which it was very easy to travel out south over the alps and north right up to the north sea and jura undertook these these journeys and i'm showing you here also the principal journeys that he undertook during his career and around which our exhibition is structured his early journeys um from nuremberg down the rind as far as basel then over the alps to italy and to venice and he returned there in 1505 to seven and then finally towards the end of his career he traveled north up the rhine in the opposite direction as we'll see to the low countries and i'm just showing you here particularly because we can't all travel so easily at the moment a few images of nuremberg jura's beautiful home city very much damaged in the middle of the 20th century but immaculately rebuilt since then and jura himself made use of these local sites particularly the bridge that you see here over the rig river pignets which he drew for himself and he went out and about around nuremberg he studied the landscape beyond particularly quarries he was very fascinated by stonework as we'll see now jura's father albrecht juror the elder who you see here in this copy of a lost portrait this portrait which is in our collection and in the exhibition jura's father was a goldsmith from hungary so he came early in his career to nuremberg where he found the city was very welcoming to artists who came from outside and he established himself as an extremely successful goldsmith and then the young albrecht juror was initially trained as a goldsmith like his father anjura writes in his family chronicle which is one of the ways in which we know so much about jura's life there are many other ways as we'll see through jura's own writings but in the chronicle he says my father saw that i was eager to apply myself in learning and so it was that after jura had initially trained as a goldsmith he said to his father well he'd like to train as a painter so his father who was obviously a very patient man agreed to apprentice him to the nuremberg painter mikhail volgomoth and jura then completed his apprenticeship as a painter now it was usual in germany and in northern europe as a whole for very young artists to set out on their travels once they've been trained to gain experience working in the workshops of other artists and to accumulate material that was going to be useful to them in the rest of their careers that they'd bring back and reuse in their workshops andura himself was encouraged by his father to travel in this way even though it was not a requirement of the town of nuremberg and he decided first of all to set out to try to meet the eminent engraver martin schoengauer and you'll see here on the screen on the right hand side a little painting in our collection from the workshop of schonggar but more significantly on the left is this large engraving of christ carrying the cross it's a very bold use of the engraving medium not only is it very detailed but it also has this bold contrast between white space here and dark shadow and here at the bottom ms martin initials his works were signed and they were made for collectors and jira could immediately see the possibilities for himself that his goldsmith training was going to be extremely useful in making engravings on copper plates unfortunately um had died when jira arrived at his workshop in colmar in 1491 but he was nevertheless made very welcome by his family and given useful contacts he also either on this occasion or on some other occasion acquired some drawings by schongauer so you can see here one of them from the british museum shown in our exhibition and i hope you can see at the top on the right jura's own annotation on this drawing he's very meticulous in annotating both his own works and the works of others that he acquired so he tells us that this is a work by martin pretty martin as he was known and he would have kept it alongside works by this artist other artists and works that he made himself now he went on from colmar to basel basel was a great place for the publishing industry and on the left hand of the screen you can see this woodcut of saint jerome in his study which forms the frontiers piece to an edition of the letters of saint jerome published in basel in 1492 and in the exhibition you can see the complete book open at this page now saint jerome was a very popular saint and a popular image for artists to depict in all kinds of media at this time showing in his him in his study with his lion gave artists the opportunity to depict an interior setting and showing him as jura does in this beautiful little painting on the right hand side from our collection showing him um in the wilderness um showing his penitence beating his breath breast with a stone gave artists the opportunity to depict a landscape setting as jura does here now just to note that in this early wood cut jura would probably have made the design but not actually have cut the wood block himself that was a skill that many professional woodcutters had but when jira made engravings he would have engraved the copper plates himself now this little painting shows jerome with his lion and you can see that in the lion in the wood cut um that lion really seems to belong to the world of heraldic representation on the right hand side the lion looks a little bit more realistic and the lion has been adapted from this beautiful watercolor that dura made in 1494 which um you can see in the extra exhibition um near the painting of saint jerome but it wasn't until much much later in his career as we'll see that jura actually encountered a real lion for the first time so this is an imagined lion he's not posed um very in a very stable way um on the ground here he's got this very long tail but he's got a rather dog-like disposition and he's got long perhaps rather cat-like ears but he is a very expressive line i think as you can see in the detail here it's perhaps the sense of eyebrows that give him that sense of expression and kindly eyes and there again you can see these rather surprisingly long ears so jura had the most extraordinary imagination i think fed by his curiosity by his observations and that enabled him to go beyond what he encountered in everyday life he was also at this period building up images of the outdoor world of the landscape as we can see here in the background of the saint jerome this beautiful painting in oils giving us an impression of sunset of the way the clouds are lit from below as well as the rocks and trees on the right hand side which as i said are probably adapted from jurors own representations of quarries around nuremberg and then in the lower right hand corner um you you have to look quite hard to see this on the original because it's a very small painting you can see the gold finch and the bullfinch beside a stream and on the reverse of this extraordinary painting is this image of a cosmic explosion and there are many theories about why this image is here on the back of the painting i think the most convincing one is that it connects with jerome as the prophet of the 15 signs of the end of the world and this is perhaps one of those signs an explosion of the end of the world so dura came back to nuremberg from his early travels he married in the summer of 1494 but then he almost immediately set out on a fresh journey traveling over the alps to italy it might sound very difficult to us to travel over the alps but there were very well trodden quite broad merchants paths to italy nuremberg had very good collections connections to italy through its trading activities and juror may even have joined a group of merchants to cross the alps he may also have been wanting to get away from the plague that was spreading in in around nuremberg at this time along his journey he made a number of sketches and watercolors some of which have survived and i'm showing you two that are shown in our exhibition on the left you can see jura's depiction of a ruined alpine shelter there's a roof that where most of the roof has actually been lost it looks very rickety but what juror is really interested in is what you can see on the right hand side this pile of stones that he has represented in some detail this drawing this sketch perhaps gives us an idea of the kind of sketch that jira might have made on the spot in any location on the right hand side you can see his view of the italian city of trent on the river at dj now this looks as though it's an image that might have been produced by jurors setting up his easel on the other side of the river and recording what he saw but this seems very unlikely because he has actually edited this view quite considerably there are no other hills here as in reality there were and there are no people at all jura is not interested in people in this view what he is very interested in is representing very beautifully in watercolor the reflections in the river that he sees before him and this kind of view was going to fuel representations in painting but particularly in engravings as we see here this is an engraving called the large fortune a nude woman who is suspended somehow above an alpine landscape so we're looking down deep into the valley into a little town called cusa or clausen and jura's representation is so accurate that it's been possible to identify that view um today apparently there's even a seat um in this viewpoint saying jura was here you can sit down and and see it for yourselves if you travel there so that's just one part though of this large engraving what jura is also doing so boldly is as in the schonger engraving we saw earlier on is creating this great contrast between white space above and the very detailed landscape below it's an extremely bold composition and it's an extremely detailed composition and it shows already the immense skill that he had achieved as an engraver on a copper plate and of course using his skill in this way to make these engravings that could be pulled and made into reproduction sold many times over meant that jura could operate independently as an artist businessman already in the late 1490s he had taken on agents to sell his prints internationally he had one agent who would sell his prints south of the alps in italy and another agent who was who would sell his prince north and jura and his family would also go and sell his prints around europe jura's wife and mother for example went to the fairs at frankfurt for example taking piles of jurors prints with them to um to sell there and of course jura's identifying famous monogram of a.d was extremely important in identifying him as the author of these prints in increasing his fame when jura travelled over the alps to italy he was very interested in what the italians knew he was very curious about their knowledge of human proportion and the art or science of perspective you're seeing here on the left and in the middle of the screen a single drawing a double-sided drawing and in the exhibition you can walk around and see it from both sides jura first of all constructed this image of an idealized female form you can see the lines that he drew out to try to get the form exactly as it's set out in the roman architect's vitruvius book on human proportion then jura flipped the paper over and he was able to see through the back the lines that he had made the first outlines and to emphasize those and to introduce light and shade and to make this a much more realistic looking version of a female form on the right hand side you can see a page from one of jura's notebooks many notebooks by juras survive this is one from the british library as juror went on throughout his career he continued to expend with to experiment with ideas of human proportion but he started to realize how difficult it was to apply that theory to the variety of the human form that one would encounter in real life so here he is trying to apply those principles to a small rather fat baby there are many many measurements he's trying to work it out but i think in the end he started to realize that it was very difficult to apply these rigid systems to um to people and to all the forms of natural life when he was in italy he almost certainly visited venice and made the acquaintance of giovanni bellini and you can see on the right here a painting by bellini of the manola and child in our collection on the left hand side is a painting that jura made of the virgin and child for a family in nuremberg the hala family i think you can see immediately what juror must have taken from seeing the works of giovanni bellini the virgin enveloped in that blue robe in a very typically venetian way the marbling in the parapet in bellini's painting there's a parapet here and the marbling is in the background here so jurass seems to have been very inspired by what he saw in venice he is also still trying to incorporate images of landscape as you can see through the background here and here again he is trying to demonstrate human the human form human proportion he's trying to do some quite difficult things the the way the arm of the baby is hooked up here is quite difficult the way he's holding the apple with his wrist hooked back and the way in which one leg is pressed against the other jura is trying to show that he can he knows how to represent the human form and on the reverse of this painting too there's a very extraordinary image the old testament story of lot and his daughters escaping sodom as it explodes in the background it's very very freely painted it's an extraordinary image of a fire of smoke of flame it's the type of image that we also see jura representing in black and white not just in color on the left you can see one of the images from jura's apocalypse in 1498 you see on the right hand side the explosion here in black and white in woodcut the apocalypse contains 15 large woodcuts and it was published as a luxury book again an example of jura's ability as an entrepreneur to to sell his work effectively in the middle of the screen you can see another example of his beautiful engraving technique the sea monster this woman captured by an extraordinary fantastic monster and taken out to sea with a landscape as as well as the seascape in the background and on the right hand side examples of dura's prince again on the right an engraving of saint christopher and upper right one of the scenes from representations of the passion jura made several of these throughout his career both in woodcut as here and engraving and again these series became very very popular dura went back to venice in 1505 to seven and this visit is very well documented because there are ten letters which survive written by jura in his own hand and you can see one of them here which we include in the exhibition it's a letter that's in the british libraries collection you can see here dura's writing and here's the back with his signature it's one of ten letters that were written to dura's friend willie bald pirkheimer who was back in nuremberg and jura was updating him with what was going on in venice with his successes his artistic successes and his failures which were mostly failures um in his shopping um expeditions for pierkheimer so he says here as concerns the carpet i've not bought one yet because i can't track down a square one they're all long and narrow pirkheimer evidently made some quite difficult demands on the shopping list but in terms of his his painting successes jira wanted to show that the venetian painters some of whom seem to have been rather jealous of his successes as an engraver as a maker of wood cuts and said that he was only really good in black and white jura wanted to prove them wrong and he says his altar pale panel is finished there's no better portrait of the virgin in the land for all artists praise it and then he says i'll be finished here in another four weeks for i've promised to do portraits of several people and then these letters are quite jokey as well he finishes saying i've just spotted a gray hair what's made it grow is sheer poverty and the way i stress myself so here are some of the portraits that jura made in venice there are three of them that we show in the exhibition but i'm showing you also here top left is a portrait by an italian artist by vincenzo cotena and i think you can see how jira adapted or adopted this head and shoulders format in the three portraits that you see here showing the figures against a dark background but i think you can also see how much more varied jurors representations are they're not nearly so sculptural and idealized as katena's portrait of a young man where there's a very strong contrast between the light on the left hand side of his face and the shadow on the right hand side jura's portraits are are lit in a contrasting way but his representations are so much more varied and individualized i think particularly in this beautiful and very well preserved portrait portrait of burkhardt but of spire that you see in the middle you get a very very strong sense of the individual nature of all of the features of this young man again jura seems to have seen works by his friend giovanni bellini and adopted some of the um aspects of compositions that he saw you're i'm showing you here um the workshop of bellini's circumcision in our collection which is a half-length composition of a type very popular in venice where the figures are shown silhouetted against a dark background and jira seems to have adopted some of this compositional principle for his extraordinary painting christ among the doctors which you see here again it's a half-length composition with a dark background and the focus is the young christ in in the temple who is arguing with the jewish elders and you can see that some of jura's representations are very cruel caricatures rather anti-semitic representations of the jewish elders in the way that they're contrasted with the young christ jura has made an extraordinary focus of the group of hands at the center of the composition they seem to rotate in contrast at the center in a very beautiful way he's also made an observation himself on the um on the painting that it was the work of five days um it seems incredible that this painting could have been completed in five days he clearly wanted to impress the people who were seeing this painting we don't know who it was made for but perhaps he completed the idea for it the composition in a very short period he may have left it unfinished and taken it back to nuremberg where his workshop may have helped to complete it he probably prepared for it very very carefully in the exhibition we're fortunate to include some of the very beautiful preparatory studies for the painting which dura made on the kind of blue paper which you could only find in venice here you can see two examples and jura adopted the principle of this type of drawing for the rest of his career using the blue as the mid-tone then using his brush and black ink to outline and create the detail of the drawings and then using white paint to to highlight um these representations of the christ child on the left and a hand holding the book um on the right when he came back from venice he didn't have a supply of this blue paper so he would take paper and he would color it with paint himself in order to continue this technique now today it's thought that perhaps these drawings may not actually be very careful of preparatory studies but very careful records of compositions that juror had made that he kept in his workshop to reuse afterwards as aid memoir perhaps notice here this shoulder and have wondered what it's doing there well this drawing was originally part of a sheet with two studies on it and in the exhibition we show them both together as they were um as they were reassembled for an exhibition at the albertina vienna two years ago the drawing on the left hand side is a study for jura's altarpiece of the rose garlands of the feast of the rose garlands which was the altarpiece that he mentioned in his letter to pierre caimer as having been very satisfactory to him and being praised by many people in venice that painting is now in prague it it doesn't travel because it's very fragile but we are lucky enough to have in our exhibition this very beautiful early copy which you see here which comes to us from vienna and that gives you a very good idea of what so impressed people you can see the glorious colors the contrast of red and blue the landscape background the little self-portrait juror often included himself in the backgrounds of his paintings that may be his friend pierre caimer him he also includes the pope and he includes the emperor maximilian and the other figures include many of the merchants the german merchants in venice who commissioned this painting one of them you can see in the drawing on the right here a study for this and on the right hand side on the left hand side you can see burkhart of spire whose individual portrait we saw just now and i'm just showing you here an image of the church for which jura made his painting the church of san bertollo mayo for the high altar there but the the painting was um acquired at the end of the 16th century um for the emperor rudolph and taken away to prague where the copy that you see was probably made dura's fame was spreading throughout europe through his prints through his engravings and woodcuts you can see here on the left jurors engraving of the prodigal son and on the right you can see a painting by his friend giovanni bellini now can you spot the similarity here on the left hand side of jurors engraving the hind quarters of an oxel bullock and the very same motif on the far left hand side of our painting now we know since this painting was restored by my colleague jill duncan a few years ago that this painting is not cut that that animal is deliberately cut off and as jill duncan identified this must be a borrowing from jurors engraving perhaps a bit of a private joke between the two artists we can see another borrowing here by an artist north of the alps jan gossart in his wonderful painting of the adoration this dog sitting here looks as though its representation might have been studied from a real dog but look at jura here this is where gothard's taken his representation from so jurors engravings could be very useful to other artists um providing motifs for their own work we can see it again in another work by gossart here was one of jura's most famous engravings on the left adam and eve and then gossart's painting of adam and eve which draws very closely on jura's engraving and then another artist the sculptor conrad might also seems to have looked closely at jurors engraving and used that to inspire those beautiful two little boxwood figures of adam and eve and if you go to the exhibition you'll see other examples even artists working in stained glass using juror's prints as inspiration so jura came back to nuremberg in 1507 and he stayed there until 1520. at this period he became really prosperous and on the proceeds of this newfound prosperity he bought a house i'm showing you here jura's house in in nuremberg one of the very few buildings that actually survived the war and i'm also showing you and what it looks like inside today i mean i don't think those pieces of furniture survive from jurors time but it gives you a very good idea of what the house might have looked like in jura's time and obviously his workshop would have been adjacent where he was producing hundreds and hundreds of his prints now when he came back to nuremberg jura continued to produce some paintings but we know from letters that he wrote that he found making large paintings a rather tedious exercise and not a very lucrative one he says very frankly in a letter to one of his patrons that really it's not worth his while to make these large altarpieces it's a much better use of his time to make engravings such as these which can then be reproduced and sold many many times over so on his return to nuremberg this is what jura tried to do to concentrate on his print making and here you can see three of the most famous and accomplished examples of his printmaking career what are known as the three master engravings which he created in 1513 and 15 14. on the left the knight death and the devil this knight riding out um on a horse his armor shining the horse's coat shining the picture of health but he's traveling through a valley and he's being assailed by these horrible figures in the background the figure of death on the left with with worms coming out of his head and the horned devil on the right hand side so this is the christian knight making his way through through life with his dog loping along below him and trying to ignore these horrible evil hazards in the middle you can see one of jura's most famous images melancholia one well there was never a two three or four so people still debate some of the meanings of this very extraordinary engraving in the background you can see a comet passing through the sky you can see the sea you can see again a dog juror love i feel he must have been a dog owner juror loves dogs and he represents them so so often but the the dog contrasts with the sphere here and notice the black face of melancholia this is the creative spirit who at the moment is somewhat depressed and contrasts with the lively little cherub who is getting on with the business of creation whereas the sands of time are running out and the angel here of melancholy cannot actually um continue with the process of creation this is an image that perhaps meant a great deal to jura himself the creative artist and then on the right hand side you can see the image of jerome in his study showing jurors extraordinary mastery of perspective in the way that you see jerome right at the back of the study and this great good hanging up in the front which almost comes into our own space then in the front is a lion remember jurass still had not seen a real lion and he represents the coat so beautifully and engraving next to the dog both animals are asleep and then you get these most beautiful effects of light and shade coming through the bottle glass window this really shows what jura can do in black and white to create these extraordinarily subtle effects of light and shade making the need for color almost redundant now i turn to jura's final journey to the low countries and the reason for him making that journey or the ostensible reason jura had been working for the emperor maximilian the emperor maximilian had ensured that jura was paid an annual pension through quite a clever device the money didn't come directly from his own coffers but he got the city of nuremberg to pay it to jura now that seemed a very satisfactory arrangement and jura was very happy to have this pension and also to carry out work for maximilian he made a number of prints for him a number of woodcuts collaborating with other artists but in 1519 the emperor died and jura became very concerned as to what might happen to his pension so he conceived the idea to travel north to the low countries to attend the coronation of maximilian's successor the emperor charles v at arkhan and he did attend the coronation and he did um successfully achieve his goal but he also spent a whole year in the low countries basing himself at antwerp here seeing the sights meeting artists and all kinds of people and recording his impressions here is a map of the low countries showing you some of the major cities that jura visited on the right a satellite view just to remind us that it looked a bit different in the 16th century antwerp on the river it was not silted up then in the 16th in the early 16th century it was beginning to become a really major trading port and of course it wasn't until the 17th century that some of those marshes on the coast above um were reclaimed under the construction of dikes it was a marshy and rather dangerous place you can see top left there antwerp a city that juror really admired and below left you can see bruges with next to it the medulla by michelangelo in the church there that juror visited um lower right is cologne which he also visited and top right is zayland where jura took a boat in december perhaps rather ill-advised to try to see a whale that had been washed up on the shore well unfortunately the whale had been washed out again by the time juror got there he was very disappointed by that and he was nearly shipwrecked on his way there well why do we know so much about these travels that's because his journal his very detailed diary of his visit survives in copies and i'm showing you on the right hand side here one of the earliest and fullest copies that we show in our exhibition and on the left hand side the single surviving sheet from the diary a diagram of how to make a lady's cloak of the type that was worn in the low countries so jura writes here that he set off in july 1520 to the low countries he took with him his wife agnes and their maid susanna and it's an extraordinary record um he tells us how much things cost he tells us who he met the works of art he saw for example um he visited the palace of the ruler of the low countries margaret of austria um she had an extraordinary art collection she owned yan vanak's arnolfini portrait that you can see here as well as one of 40 little paintings by wanda flanders you see our example lower right here her court sculptor was conrad might who made those images of adam and eve and jura met him his meetings with margaret herself were not so successful he tells us that he met her twice he hoped to impress her he hoped it seems to make a large altarpiece for him for her but on their second meeting he presented her with a portrait of her father the emperor maximilian and she rejected it to jura's great puzzlement and consternation so he never made the altarpiece that he envisaged making other meetings were more successful he had two meetings with the great humanist erasmus he went to the house of the artist quentin mezis who made this image of erasmus that you see here on the left on the right hand side you can see the portrait engraving of erasmus that juror eventually completed in 1526 it's one of the last works you'll see in our exhibition erasmus became very frustrated with jura jura made several drawings of him when he was in the low countries but he didn't actually complete his portrait until much much later and erasmus was was worried that he was becoming much much older and that he wouldn't look well in his portrait again i think a little bit of a jokey response another portrait that jira made but which is lost to us today is the portrait he made of the exiled king of denmark christian ii and you see here the portrait by quentin mezis that we show in the exhibition that may have influenced the portrait that jura himself made jura tells us in his diary in great excitement that he was summoned to a banquet of brussels by the king and that he was asked to make his portrait and he had very quickly to find a wooden panel and to get somebody to grind up the colours so that he could make the portrait he made a sketch of the king first of all and then he very quickly made a finished oil painting and he tells us that christian was delighted with the finished painting now pretty much everywhere jura went he was making drawings very often portrait drawings and very often drawings in his little silver point sketchbook and you see here one of the sheets that survive here's the front and here's the back and if you go into the exhibition you'll see three of these sheets and you'll be able to walk around and see what's on the front as well as what's on the back of each sheet now i showed you right at the start jira's own image of himself age 13 made with a silver point his silver shift that he tells us about and to make this technique work you needed a paper that was coated with a preparation a sort of off-white preparation a kind of painted surface that perhaps dura bought ready-made in a notebook and then using the silver point the silver stylus you would draw upon this ground and the oxidation would actually create this gray line once you've made it you couldn't correct it so it required immense skill to make the kind of very detailed drawings that jura made and he made these drawings at different times and in different places on the left is a merchant lazarus ravensberger jira hobnobbed with a lot of german merchants on the right is a tower from the grandest house in antwerp that juror admired on the reverse of the sheet two drawings of women we don't know who they were wearing the costume of the low countries which juror was very interested to record we'll see in a moment again those very deep third sleeves when jira went to arkhan he visited and saw the cathedral there which he sketched from the town hall and he also seems to have stayed in an inn and sketched there a table some jugs and a chest so what what he drew what caught his eye what caught his curiosity seems to us often rather random but no doubt once again he was going to use these images in his work later on he made many friends met with many people one of them was this man um felix hungersberg who jura described as a one-eyed luteinist well i think you can see there that something has happened to one of his eyes jura made at least three drawings of him we have two in our exhibition um he records in his diary that for one of the drawings felix was so delighted with it that he gave jura a hundred oysters jura doesn't tell us how long it took him to consume those there was a lot of bartering going on sometimes jura exchanged his drawings sometimes he sold them as well as the silver point drawings and the pen and ink sketches you just saw jira also made a number of large chalk and charcoal drawings in the one in the middle here of a woman you can see that jura has inscribed it himself at the top rather carefully with the date 1520 with the age of the woman and with his own monogram people have connected this with a record in jura's diary of juror making a portrait of a nun but jura says she's called mexican little margaret so other people have argued that this seems a little bit familiar for a nun so this is perhaps a portrait of another woman on to left and right are portraits of young men um we're not quite sure who they are the one on the left it's been suggested maybe a merchant called bernhardt von reesen and here is an oil portrait of bernhard he's holding a piece of paper on which his name is written we have it in the exhibition next to the drawing they do look a little bit different so i think it's not completely established that they are the same man on the right hand side is a poor another oil painting of a porch of a man who may perhaps be another merchant but we don't know who he is these are both extremely dramatic head and shoulders portraits and the one on the left with the red background the contrast between the red black and white is very dramatic and the lighting is extremely dramatic as well particularly the way in which the shadow cast on the right hand side joined to the line created by the shoulder and then the edge of the hat makes this diagonal going right through the middle of the composition and there's a similar effect with the portrait on the right where the man is wearing this absolutely magnificently described fur collar now i've mentioned that jura didn't see a lion throughout most of his life although he represented lions very often when he got to the low countries he had the opportunity to visit two zoos or menageries one at brussels and one at ghent and you can see here this very rough quick sketch that dura made at brussels of the menagerie there you can see he's actually looking out from an upper window of the royal palace so he's looking down on one of the turrets and he's looking out onto the grounds he can see people jousting he can see a garden and he can see animals and he noted in his diary that it was completely wonderful it was like a paradise now we can see some of the results in this very very beautiful and much more finished drawing which i think is one of the stars of our exhibition on the left hand side there are some little sketches of sights that juror has seen on the rhine and then on the right hand side there are three lions here here and here top and bottom they're sleeping lions perhaps jura was hoping to make another image of jerome with a lion in it and here is this wonderful i think image of a lion which seems to be just stretching as it wakes up from asleep and shaking its mane about and this representation of a baboon is extremely accurate jurors colored it and given it the pink bottom and the blue fur of this particular type of baboon i mentioned jura's interest in dress so here are some more images of women's dress this large drawing on the left hand side again with these deep cuffs and the fur lining um hooked up against the the mud that women would have encountered in the streets and on the right hand side two women in the dress of livonia perhaps not images that juror saw when he was walking around perhaps images that he took from a costume book and recorded for his own use now in his diary juror records his meeting with the artist susanna horembaut one of a family of artists who made illuminated books such as the one you see here um one of a page from a book called the schwarzer hours which was completed for margaret of austria herself and jura makes his perhaps slightly patronizing comment it's a great wonder that a woman can do such work well jura did also actually buy a work by susanna he tells us that he bought an illumination of the salvatore mundi of the representation of christ holding a globe representing the world no such image by susanna seems to survive but we do have this beautiful image from the schwarzer ours which may well be by susanna herself jura also tells us that he saw a number of works which had just arrived in brussels from the terrible conquests of mexico that were occurring at that time and he saw some extraordinary pieces of metal work um in silver and gold a sun and a moon enormous pieces and he says i was amazed at the subtle ingeniousness of people in foreign lands again his curiosity here about what he what he sees and seeks out we don't have any visual record by jura himself of what he saw but we have included in the exhibition this image by um hans burgmaier burgmaier and jura both worked for the emperor maximilian and made imaginative reconstructions of the people from those lands from mexico and south america such as this one here in which um bergmai has misinterpreted what he has been no doubt told or seen so there's what he's represented here as a feathered skirt is in fact a feathered cape jura himself did make some extremely beautiful representation of the many black people who were in europe at this period either enslaved people or people who worked as servants and as free people um this beautiful study of catharina from the uffizi was shown in our sister exhibition um which happened at arkhan last summer and unfortunately this drawing was only able to be lent to one venue so i'm just showing it to you here another artist that juror made friends with was your kim paternier who he said was a skilled landscape painter who invited me to his wedding now paternia made large and spectacular landscape paintings with very small figures in them here you can see the little figure of saint jerome and this enormous landscape behind dura made four paternity room representations of saint christopher and there is in the exhibition this beautiful sheet from berlin in which jura has given us nine variations on the theme of saint christopher carrying the christ child across a river in the legend saint christopher was a giant and he carried as he carried the child across the river he became heavier and heavier and heavier and when he got to the other side he revealed himself as christ anson christopher became converted to christianity i think this is one of the most skillful and beautiful drawings that jura ever made and it's beautifully preserved so many variations so much light and shade used in these small sketches in this painting of saint christopher that paternity has left us in the prado today he doesn't seem to have actually used jura's image of jura which is rather puzzling in the last part of his life jura became extremely interested in the ideas of martin luther on the left-hand screen you can see um the portrait by cranach of martin luther when he grew a beard as a disguise and his friends took him for safekeeping because they thought he was going to be arrested on the right hand side you can see in jura's beautiful handwriting a list of the pamphlets by luther that he had bought himself they were all in german because jura probably didn't read latin very easily and he tells us when he was in the low countries he bought more of them and his reading of luther and luther's emphasis on the new testament seems to have had a strong influence on jura at this period he made several drawings of the passion you'll see them in the last room of the exhibition we don't know what they were made for perhaps he was thinking of a new series of prints we're not quite sure but they seem to show a very close reading of the new testament particularly in the one on the right it's an unusual subject in itself christ laid out on the slab to be embalmed and the young man here is holding up this very very large jar of embalming ointment and in the gospels in the new testament we're told exactly how much that jar weighed and i suspect that jura had read that and that's why he represented this jar as so being so very very large there are a whole series of these drawings and he represented the same scene several times as he tells us in his journal now at the end of the exhibition we show this wonderful image of saint jerome lentrus from the museum in lisbon and jura tells us in his journal i painted a jerome carefully in oils and gave it to rodrigo rodrigo was the portuguese merchant's factor in antwerp and jura seems to have struck up a strong friendship with him they exchanged gifts rodrigo gave jura two green parrots and several other gifts and at the end of his stay in antwerp in the summer of 1521 he was packing up all of these gifts but he had given to rodrigo this beautiful and very innovative painting of saint jerome this is saint jerome in his study but there are very few details of the background here the emphasis just on the crucified christ we don't see saint jerome's cardinals robe and that's perhaps because for lutherans jerome was a rather ambivalent figure he was no longer to be relied upon luther was making a new translation of the bible so that people no longer had to rely on jerome's own latin translation jerome is pointing to the human skull here the emphasis is very much on thinking of human mortality and the way that jura has framed this composition is to thrust saint jerome forward into our own space in a very dramatic and extraordinary way you can also if you visit the exhibition i think appreciate the extraordinary skill with which jura has um depicted the face of saint jerome his model was a 93 year old man and the beautiful detail and texture of the beard and curls of his hair it's a tour de force of painting it was an image that had a great influence on artists in the low countries it must have been available for them to see for some time afterwards on the left lucas van lieden's beautiful drawing and on the right use vanclaves painting which you can both see in the exhibition so finally jura returned to nuremberg for the end of his life he was not a well man he seems to have picked up an illness in the low country probably malaria and picked up in the those northern marshes it doesn't seem to have affected his ability um to paint his artistic skill as we see in this extraordinary illusionistic portrait of the nuremberg merchant johannes clay berger which is the last work that you see as you leave the exhibition and i'd just like to remind you that a great deal of new research was produced for this exhibition and you can read all about it in the catalogue of the exhibition you see what you see in this slide here but thank you very much for listening to this talk this afternoon if you haven't yet visited the exhibition i very much hope you'll enjoy it thank you [Applause] you

Channel: The National Gallery

Views: 48,247

Keywords: fineart, artgallery, painting, museum, arthistory, European Art, The National Gallery, london

Id: gmx-dWbK7jk

Length: 62min 55sec (3775 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2022